Context
Einstein was born during the imperial era in Germany
in 1879. He died 76 years later in Princeton, New Jersey exactly
one decade after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the dropping of
the atomic bombs on Japan. He thus witnessed the two world wars,
the high point and demise of the old European order, and the rise
of industrialization and new technologies such as telephones, automobiles,
X-rays, and radioactivity. But Einstein himself inaugurated some
of the most fundamental transformations of his age, including the
rise of theoretical physics, the extension of Newtonian mechanics
to the submicroscopic realm of atoms and nuclei, and the birth
of relativity theory. Einstein was thus both a product and a shaper
of the scientific and cultural context in which he lived and worked.
Einstein grew up during the years following the unification
of Germany in 1871, a time of widespread growth in European industrial
power, strong militaristic nationalism, and imperialist expansion.
Technological advances led to a renewed faith in material progress,
especially with the replacement of the old steam- and mechanically
powered world with the new modern "electropolis." The rise of electric
power challenged the reigning nineteenth-century mechanical worldview,
which holds that all matter obeys Newton's laws of motion and that
all natural phenomena arise from the interactions of moving matter.
New advances in electromagnetic theory by nineteenth-century scientists
such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell could not be explained
in terms of the old mechanical picture, and physicists in Einstein's
day were confronted with the challenge of finding a complete mechanical
account of electrodynamic theory that was consistent with the Newtonian
paradigm.
Einstein grew up as a Jew in time of rising anti-Semitism.
The reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair in France spread across
Europe in the 1890s and inspired early Zionist thinkers such as
Theodore Herzl to work towards the creation of a Jewish state.
In 1911, the headquarters of the Zionist movement relocated to
Berlin, where Einstein was teaching. Thus in spite of his own
disavowal of traditional religious rituals and traditions, Einstein
became involved in one of the greatest movements in Jewish history.
Einstein lived just long enough to witness the creation of the
Jewish state of Israel in 1948; he was even asked to be the president
of the new nation in 1952, an offer he graciously declined.
Einstein's support of the Zionist movement was partially
a response to the rampant anti-Semitism that spread across Germany with
the rise of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in January 1933.
Under the infamous Law for the Restoration of the Career Civil
Service of April 1, 1933, the Nazis excluded Jews from all state
posts, including universities and other research institutions.
Physics was one of the disciplines most devastatingly affected
by this new law, suffering a loss of at least 25% of its 1932-33
personnel. Yet even before the 1930s, many academicians were increasingly
suspicious of the high rate of Jewish participation in medicine
and the natural sciences. This anti-Semitic sentiment was combined
with a more general suspicion of the materialism and commercialism
associated with science as a field. Hitler held
mathematics and the physical sciences in low regard in comparison
to those disciplines that promoted Kultur, man's
humanistic achievements in society. Einstein, as a Jew and as
a physicist, was one of the first targets of Nazi propaganda.
In contrast, in America, science enjoyed enormous prestige
in the 1920s and 1930s; thus when Einstein arrived on a tour of
the country in 1922, he was hailed as a hero. The 1920s witnessed
the rapid growth of the physics community in America, including
a rise in the numbers of Jews in the sciences, since science was
one of the few fields that offered American Jews the opportunity
for professional status in the gentile world. The 1920s and 1930s
were also years of mass popularization and politicization of science.
Thus, the arrival of refugees from Europe (such as Einstein) in
the years immediately preceding World War
II only served to strengthen what was already one
of the strongest and most vigorous branches of the world physics
community at the time.
